Submitted
by
who_stole_my_kidneys
on Friday September 21, 2012 @02:08PM

who_stole_my_kidneys writes: Evidence suggest the Iranian government is behind cyber attacks this week that have targeted the websites of JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. The attack is described by one source, a former U.S. official familiar with the attacks, as being "significant and ongoing" and looking to cause "functional and significant damage." Also, one source suggested the attacks were in response to U.S. sanctions on Iranian banks.

SquarePixel writes: Facebook has disabled facial recognition features on its site for all new European users. The move follows stringent privacy recommendations made by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. Facebook plans to delete all Tag Suggest information and delete the feature for existing EU users by October 15th at the latest. "The news comes as the DPC publishes a lengthy report on a re-audit of the company, which has its European headquarters in Dublin. The report is broadly positive, and the decision to disable Tag Suggest appears to have played a major role in assuaging the Commissioner's office."

tetrahedrassface writes: The first city in the U.S. to offer a screaming fast fiber network has now announced customers will get a free 60% boost in speed. If you had the 30 MB/sec service you now will get 50. Mid-range customers get a doubling for free, while the high end consumers of fiber get an average 250% boost. The fiber network recently passed 40,000 members and judging from a test of my business, we are currently over 300 MB/sec. It's awesome!

Chemist Olga Nikolaevna Zelenina heads a laboratory at the Penza Agricultural Institute. She is an expert in the biology of hemp and poppy, and is a sought-after expert in legal cases involving narcotics produced from these plants. Last year, she was asked by defence lawyers to give her opinion in a case involving imported poppy seeds. The prosecutors didn't like her evidence though, and now she's in prison accused of complicity in organized drug trafficking.

SquarePixel writes: Bloomberg has an interesting story about Microsoft's efforts to simultaneously woo younger workers and to get more apps into its Windows Store. "Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, designed Windows 8 for touch-screen technology included in the company's first tablet, Surface, and other devices coming this year. To gain share in tablets, a market expected by DisplaySearch to reach $66.4 billion in 2012, Microsoft needs enough apps to challenge the more than 200,000 available for iPad. Using student recruits is one way Microsoft can woo app developers who are used to building programs for mobile phones and tablets, where the company has little and no share, respectively. Luring programmers before graduation is particularly critical for recruitment in the U.S., which lags behind countries such as India and China in its ability to crank out qualified engineers."

curtwoodward writes: "For most consumers, monthly subscriptions are still something for magazines and cable TV. With Office 365, Microsoft is about to embark on a huge social experiment to see if they'll also pay that way for basic software.But in doing so, Microsoft has jacked up prices on its old fee structure to make subscriptions seem like a better deal. And that could really leave a bad impression with financially struggling consumers."

They used a "magic trick" to reverse a person's responses to such moral issues as "Large-scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism", by switching "forbidden" to "permitted" when the subject turned the page of the questionaire. When asked to read back the questions and answers, about half of the subjects did not detect the changes, and a full 53% of participants argued unequivocally for the opposite of their original attitude in at least one of the manipulated statements.

ananyo writes: "Vesta, the second-most-massive body in the asteroid belt, was thought to be bone dry. But NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has found evidence that smaller, water-rich asteroids once implanted themselves in Vesta’s surface. The water stays locked up in hydrated minerals until subsequent impacts create enough heat to melt the rock and release the water as a gas, leaving pitted vents in the surface. The discovery shows that yet another body in the inner Solar System has a water cycle."

An anonymous reader writes: It’s no secret that Mozilla has been working on a mobile OS. Previously codenmed Boot2Gecko, the project focused on a purely HTML5 based system that worked in many ways like current mobile devices. As the project grew into Mozilla OS, the company has laid out a partnership with ZTE that will have real world devices in certain markets early next year. Testing for this OS had previously consisted of a compiled ROM that would be flashed over a handful of Android devices. Now, Mozilla has moved into full fledged product evaluation mode with their own custom developer phone.